World War I battlefield nurse Bess Crawford goes to dangerous lengths to investigate a wounded soldier's background -- and uncover his true loyalties -- in this thrilling and atmospheric entry in the bestselling ''vivid period mystery series'' (<i>New York Times Book Review</i>) .<br><br>At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire, stretcher-bearers find an exhausted officer, shivering with cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford's aid station, where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is, the officer isn't British -- he's French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German.<br><br>When Bess reports the incident to Matron, her superior offers a ready explanation. The soldier is from Alsace-Lorraine, a province in the west where the tenuous border between France and Germany has continually shifted through history, most recently in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, won by the Germans. But is the wounded man Alsatian? And if he is, on which side of the war do his sympathies really lie?<br><br>Of course, Matron could be right, but Bess remains uneasy -- and unconvinced. If he was a French soldier, what was he doing so far from his own lines and so close to where the Germans are putting up a fierce, last-ditch fight?<br><br>When the French officer disappears in Paris, it's up to Bess -- a soldier's daughter as well as a nurse -- to find out why, even at the risk of her own life.<br><br>
